The East River Review

Patti Smith Does The Hamptons

2007-12-10T03:10:00.001-08:00

Patti Smith, you
are not looking good.
You must know that.
The years have
weathered you like
a Cape Cod shingle.

I suppose you
are as angry at this life
as you ever were, back
when you crawled in
from The Jersey Suburbs
to hang in The Bunker
with Burroughs
and Ginsberg,
and Mapplethorpe.

The Original
Bowery Fag-Hag.

I can only imagine
the suffering endured,
dragging a brush
through that hair.
But you stayed on
your feet last night,
despite the teetering,
sustaining yourself
with a bottle of
Poland Spring.

If I had had
the chance to
actually speak to you,
I would have told you
that I am a poet too.

And if there was
any hope of a reply,
I might have asked
you why you
spit on my new shoe.

—Daniel Thomas Moran

Daniel Thomas Moran is the author of five volumes of poetry, the most recent, From HiLo to Willow Pond, was published by Street Press in 2002. He has read widely at libraries, schools and universities throughout New York City and Long Island and has done readings in Ireland, Italy and Austria. From 1997-2005 he served as Vice-President of The Walt Whitman Birthplace Association in West Hills, New York where he instituted The Long Island School of Poetry Reading Series and has been Literary Correspondent to Long Island Public Radio where he hosted The Long Island Radio Magazine. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize on three occasions. In 2005 he was appointed Poet Laureate by The Legislature of Suffolk County, New York. He has edited The Light of City and Sea: An Anthology of Suffolk County Poetry (Street Press, 2006). His collected papers are being archived by The State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is a practicing Doctor of Dentistry on Shelter Island in New York where he lives with his wife Karen.

Poor Man's Diamond

2007-10-15T14:43:00.001-07:00

I'd go out, see Agnieszka behind
the splintered greyness of the wind,
red maple leaves so close I'd touch
them in their resurrected flights.

I'd lug a hard-on in my pocket,
or chunk of looking-glass bright coal,
pretend it was a genuine diamond
and offer it on a dime-store string.

Love had turned me into alchemist.
But a woman with ambition,
she gave it back to keep me warm,

heat from her fingers like a furnace
twenty calendar years later
whenever I shave or comb grey.

—Leo Yankevich

Leo Yankevich’s poetry has appeared in scores of magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, among humbler titles in American Jones, ArtWord Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, Cedar Hill Review, Chronicles, Envoi, The MacGuffin, Poetry Notingham, Staple, Sulphur River Literary Review, The Tennessee Review, Visions International, and The Windsor Review. He lives with his wife and three sons in Gliwice, Poland, where he works as a translator and serves as the poetry editor for The New Formalist (thenewformalist.com)

Sunrise In Riyadh (1986)

2007-10-15T13:34:00.001-07:00

Facing east, the faithful mutter
into the mars-red sand.

She is small-boned, a slim
fourteen as she kneels
in her newly fashioned chador which
covers her from head to erotic foot.

Fifty times the flogger's
rope strikes: red threads
of silk split over her. How slim
her body bent in shame,
how small in prayer.

A truck arrives with concrete;
hundreds of men lob them at her,
chunked missiles strike
her down into the searing sand.

In two hours she is pronounced dead.
How merciful; how merciful.

—Teresa White

Teresa White has had over 200 poems published in online journals over the past 10 years. Her first book, "In What Furnace" may be purchased directly through the author.

meat and marrow

2007-10-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

the providence of men
is madness
and when they disembowel you with lies
look not to heaven but to the tattered
self
reflected ten-fold
in worlds of shattered soul

the great works of art?
gamble them against your hunger
pile them on the floor
naked so you see their danger

everything flesh turns against birth

the bartender leans forward
yellow hands and lying smile
you drink
letting the arms of the clock
fall around your feet
your most precious art
pissed away
exorcised

the intensity of the endeavor
necessitates
the narrowness
of the life

meat and marrow
the breaking of bone
and time and mortality

did you really believe that art alone
could save you from this?

o child child child

your father is a stone
in a forgotten cemetery
from which no one bothers
to pull the weeds

—Kurt Eisenlohr

Kurt Eisenlohr is a painter and bartender living in Portland, Oregon. His poetry and fiction has appeared in numerous journals and magazines including Asylum, Verbal Abuse, River Styx, Another Chicago Magazine, Cokefishing, Way Station, and Stovepiper. His chapbook, Under Hand and Over Bone was published by Alpha Beat Press in 1994. A new chapbook of his poems, is due out this year from Lummox Press.

Perhaps

2007-10-15T13:09:00.000-07:00

Unlike mere beasts, we are free to make choices,
or so we like to think: we may choose
to postpone a gourmet meal or a murder,
refuse to construct a shelter from the rain,
or carefully learn a worse way to build one.
We may draw certain pleasures from pain

or hang (for attention's sake) from a steel girder
thirty stories above the insect voices.
We may straddle the fence between differing views
or choose not to watch the evening news.

Can we foresee the future or re-live the hour,
choose whom to love, and fully erase
through strength of will an adored one's face?
Some choices, perhaps, are not in our power.

—William Ruleman

William Ruleman is an associate professor of English at Tennessee Wesleyan College. His poems have been published in Berkeley Poetry Review, Acumen, Envoi, Orbis, and many other journals.

October Steeping

2007-10-15T13:03:00.000-07:00

Vermillion leaves outside
burn against the cold blue sky.
I pour a drink and keep inside,
concentrate on staying high,
and I guess I'll booze and sleep
the whole gaudy month—
as things go to seed,
I'll sink and steep.
Outside I see, dark flapping wings.
of croaking city crows
sailing down the street,
perching in powerline rows:
their atterimages repeat
inside my boozy mind
after I pull the blind.

—Philip Miller

Philip Miller has poems forthcoming in Iota, Home Planet News, and Poetry Wales. His new book, The Casablanca Fan, is due this year. He recently co-edited (with Gloria Vando) the anthology Chance of a Ghost.

Resurrection

2007-10-15T13:01:00.001-07:00

Heat waves rise from the fields in tropic sun.
Along the dusty road the battered cars
lie in a field. These rusty skeletons
have been collected here and abandoned, far
from the emptied cities, their headlights blind as stone.
They lie unclaimed, their ownership unknown.

Skulls are piled on a table. Jawless and round,
some rest at an angle. All have eggshell cracks.
They stare into themselves, reliving the sound
of the hatchet, the crushing bar, the iron pickaxe.
Out of the grove and grave, they lie revealed,
stolid as geodes broken in the field.

The storm has receded now. The violence ebbs,
leaving a shoal of bones thrown in a tangle,
smooth and hard with the heft and weight of clubs,
in hexagons and accidental angles.
Their knurled ends are porous with honeycombs,
small cells filled with detritus, blood and loam.

Dark birds pick through the silent, polished tiers
of knob and shank and curve. Prismatic eyes
of waxy scorpions glitter and disappear
in this wilderness of jackstraw ribs and thighs.
A swell of pelvis rises as a wave
stilled in its cresting. Ribs curve up like staves.

A child meanders among a stand of trees
and stoops to pick up an object in the dust,
examines it, then gives it to her mother
who drops it back to the earth. Pity? Disgust?
The ground grows human teeth, and no one bothers
to mourn these countless anonymities.

Starlings twitter and squeak in the hot schoolyard.
Their chattering hints of what still lies inside.
Shuttered windows high in the gray walls hide
the cramped stone cells, the shackles and the barred
cell doors, the bloodstained tile. In silent air
there is a lingering presence of despair.

And there is a wall with nameless photographs,
each with a number. A woman with haunted eyes,
who lies somewhere in the bleaching cenotaph,
pleads from her photo that we realize
she was that mother whose child plucks at her sleeve.
She was alive, and she was here. Believe

these scattered ones, exhumed from the skullcapped ground.
Insistent, blind and dumb as the seasons' turning,
they whisper of dust, and the earth's relentless round,
and they will be heard again, urgent and burning
with what they have seen.
Like chattering birds, they will come,
full of their secrets, out of the hecatomb.

—Jerry H. Jenkins

Jerry H. Jenkins' poems have appeared on leading-edge poetry sites on the internet, such as The New Formalist, Terrain, Poetry Life and Times, Pyrowords, Eclectica, Octavo and La Petite Zine. He is co-author of the book-length collection "The Weird Sonneteers" with Keith Allen Daniels and Ann K. Schwader (Anamnesis Press), and author of the chapbooks "Avian" (Anamnesis Press), Candle and "The Garden of the Sun" (Helionaut Press).

Currency

2007-10-15T12:56:00.001-07:00

So he went to dance among the beggars' fires
and to seek the secrets of their sleep among the lintels,
and he learned what dreams come beneath the lamplight
most times linger on at waking, that they mat and tangle
among the itch of lice and burr, and so he rended his clothes
with stones and stray blades and he appeared as they,
and marked their signs and words on dark beams beneath bridges.

And he tasted the grissle of rat and mongrel, and among the coals
of some evenings chased ghosts with them through the rot
of churches and store-houses until their soles were slashed
and bleeding, until their wounds swelled black and swarmed
with eyeless things, and most nights they mumbled many names
through shivers, and fleas crawled in the frenzy of their heat,
and when they awoke from fevers they were given new names:
Shambles, Tatters, Walker, Grey, and he was one of them,
and wandered among them through their days.

One moonset in September he found a coin among the weeds,
and the face upon it was haggard and wild, and he wondered
what king was this to stare so haunted, what lands
might be governed by one such as he? And he carried
its weight in the sweat of his palm for many evenings,
and felt it grow slick and warm in the cup of his hand,
and it sang in his pockets, but he could not take leave of it
for the merchants refused to trade with him and claimed him
a maker of false currencies.

Though he hungered, he could not eat of it, though
thirst might ember in the chimney of his throat,
he could not drink of it, and so he cursed the face
on the coin and lamented his state among the gutters
of the street, and then one morning among the fogs he fell
among the shimmer of puddles and saw eyes staring
from the water, and he saw in the bend of the circle
his own eyes and the eyes of the coin, and he saw
they were his own.

He rose up among the dandelion and thistle
and beheld all the fallen things and all the forgotten things,
and the sway and bend of all the dying things, and he
saw the lands to which he held court, and the wind
was a voice and his voice was a wind, and it scattered
stray leaves in the corners of the ruins, and the ruins
were a house in which something moaned and rattled,
in which something pounded deep within, in which something
pounded deep, without.

—Brian Long

Brian Long makes his home in Tennessee where he manages an inn.